A blind eye to children’s suffering

When it comes to local government, we too often shrug over things that ought to enrage us.

A month ago, readers of this column may recall a paragraph citing Times reports that 31 children in the care of L.A. County’s child-welfare system have died from abuse or neglect over the last two years. It went on to note that “Trish Ploehn, who directs the responsible agency -- the Department of Children and Family Services -- says that in 18 of those cases, the social worker charged with safeguarding the child’s welfare committed serious errors. At least some of those mishandled cases are among the 12 most recent deaths. Ploehn, however, backed by myopic county lawyers who seem determined to treat a life-and-death public issue like a product liability case, refuses to release any information on these last dozen deaths.”

That column ended with a rhetorical question: “At some point, the five supervisors need to ask just how long we’re going to go on sacrificing some of our most vulnerable children on the dubious altar of bureaucratic convenience.”

Well, now we know they were willing to go on sacrificing poor children for at least another month, because the body count has mounted to 32.

This time, it doesn’t really matter much how deftly Ploehn and her enablers in the county counsel’s office -- people who behave more like mob lawyers than attorneys employed in the public service -- want to play hide the ball. The facts of this latest case are so brutally shocking, and Children and Family Services’ response so utterly inadequate, as to permit no conclusion but incompetence.

Two-year-old Viola Vanclief was one of those children inexplicably consigned by providence to birth -- and death -- in pain. County authorities took her from her mother, a violent, drug-abusing schizophrenic who refused to take her medications and neglected her infant. As it turned out, little Viola might have come to feel that simple neglect was a blessing. The county placed her with a foster mother named Kiana Barker -- against whom five complaints of physically and sexually abusing children in her care had been lodged over the last few years. In 2002, she was found to have severely neglected her own child. Her live-in boyfriend, James Julian, is a convicted armed robber.

Barker claims that on March 4, Viola became trapped in a bed frame and that she inadvertently struck the toddler with a hammer while trying to free her. (Trapped in a bed frame? Freed with a hammer?) According to coroner’s records, the child had multiple bruises on her body and her death was a homicide caused by blunt-force trauma. Police arrested Barker and Julian on suspicion of murder, then released them both on the district attorney’s request for further investigation. Angry yet?

Well, try this: Barker, despite her history, and despite the presence in her home of a man legally barred from being involved with foster children, was a state-licensed employee of United Care Inc., which the county contracts with for the care of 216 helpless and vulnerable foster children, like the tragic Viola, in 88 homes. It sounds, though, as if Barker must have fit right in there, since the Department of Children and Family Services goes right on doing business with United Care even though -- as The Times’ Garrett Therolf reported this week -- the company “repeatedly has been cited in recent years after caregivers choked, hit and whipped their charges with a belt. In 2007, a foster child under the agency’s care drowned by swimming unsupervised in a pool.”

Eighteen days after Viola apparently was beaten to death with a hammer, the county employee ultimately responsible for her care -- Ploehn -- still can’t explain how the toddler was sent to live with a known child abuser and a convicted felon. “I’m still in the information-gathering phase,” she said. “I’m still pulling the state regs to determine who was responsible to assess the history and who was responsible to follow up following the subsequent hotline calls [regarding Barker’s allegedly abusive behavior]. It’s a complicated and complex analysis.”

No it’s not, because the fact that the head of the Department of Children and Family Services doesn’t know who in her own department follows up abuse complaints pretty much tells the rest of us who live on planet Earth what’s wrong here.

Here’s a suggestion. Why don’t the five county supervisors and new County Counsel Andrea Ordin go over to the morgue and ask the coroner to walk them through his autopsy of Viola Vanclief? And after they’ve had a good look at her battered and now dissected little body, why don’t they call Trish Ploehn in front of a public session of the board and ask her to explain exactly what’s “complicated” about this case -- and precisely why she should keep her job?

timothy.rutten@latimes.com